Taliban attack renews insurgency fears in Pak

The Pakistani Taliban, though pushed to the margin, has survived and retained its capacity for brutality

Attacks on education have long been a signature atrocity of the Pakistani Taliban, whose militants have set schools on fire, banished girls from classrooms and gunned down students at their desks in a quest to impose an extremist ideology on Pakistani society.

The height of the attacks seemed to come in December 2014 when gunmen swarmed through a school in Peshawar, massacring dozens of schoolchildren in an assault that prompted widespread revulsion and a fierce military crackdown on militants.

But on Wednesday, Pakistanis were drawn back into their national nightmare. At least four Taliban attackers stormed a university campus in another northwestern town, gunning down at least 20 people, most of them students and teachers.

After a year in which the Pakistani Taliban had finally seemed to be pushed to the margin, with attacks at their lowest pace in a decade, the new school assault renewed worries that the insurgency, even if diminished, has survived and retained its capacity for brutality.

The attack, at the Bacha Khan University in Charsadda, 20 miles from Peshawar, began just before 9 am when the militants, using winter fog as cover, slipped through nearby fields and scaled a rear wall. Gunfire and explosions rang out across the campus as the attackers, some apparently teenagers themselves, rushed through classrooms and dormitories shouting “Allahu akbar!” as they fired.

Witnesses described scenes of carnage as gunmen sprayed bullets at students, one of whom leapt through a window while others cowered in bathrooms. Many staff members locked themselves in their offices. But one junior chemistry lecturer, armed with a pistol, was reported to have returned fire; witnesses said his actions helped several students escape before he, too, was killed.

The assault ended after hours of pitched combat when the security forces cornered the attackers into two university buildings. The attackers were killed before they could explode their suicide vests, officials said.

For the Taliban movements in Pakistan and Afghanistan, attacks on education were an early marker of their extremist ideology and ruthless methods. Schools, as all-in-one symbols of government authority and a modernist view of the future that jihadists loathe, provided easy targets and maximal shock value.

But those tactics have become something of a liability over the years, winnowing the extremists’ support even among conservatives who might otherwise support their goal of harsh Islamic rule.

One turning point was the Taliban attempt on the life of the schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai in 2012, transforming her into a global icon of courage and energising other education campaigners in Pakistan.

The 2014 assault in Peshawar, in particular, seemed to galvanise fragmented public opinion about how to deal with jihadi militancy. And it set the conditions for a harsh army crackdown on the group in which more than 300 prisoners have been hanged in the past year, some under a new network of military courts. Since then, Taliban attacks in Pakistan have become relatively rare.

Some militants, however, remain undeterred. In a phone interview, Khalifa Omar Mansoor, the commander of the Taliban faction that orchestrated the Peshawar attack, said he had also ordered the bloodshed in Charsadda.

Mansoor, who commands a faction based in a nearby tribal district, described the violence as retribution for the army’s harsh crackdown over the past year, calling it a “lesson to the military leadership of Pakistan.” He released a photo that showed him sitting with four armed men, mostly teenagers, whom he described as the attackers — a surreal image that juxtaposed the five militants against a beautiful vista of verdant meadows and mountain peaks.

But Pakistan’s main Taliban group quickly distanced itself from the attack. In a statement, a spokesman for the group, the Tehrik-e-Taliban — which despite years of internal conflict and splintering still claims to represent the country’s main Taliban factions, including Mansoor’s — threatened to bring its organisers before a Shariah court.

“Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan condemns this un-Islamic act in strongest terms and disassociates itself from this entirely,” the spokesman said. The attack also had an unmistakable political dimension for its targeting of peaceful political elements inside ethnic Pashtun society.

The Charsadda university is named after Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a celebrated pre-independence leader known as “the frontier Gandhi” for advocating nonviolent resistance to British colonial rule.

The political party that carries Khan’s legacy, the Awami National Party, sustained huge political losses in the last general election in 2013 after a concerted Taliban campaign of violence against its supporters and candidates. Wednesday’s assault occurred on the anniversary of Ghaffar Khan’s death and hours before the university was to host a poetry recital in his honour to which hundreds had been invited.

Flowers that wilted

Sajjad Ahmed, a professor of sociology and gender studies, said he was in his office when he heard the first shots, then saw a young attacker shouting “Allahu akbar” and running toward the student dormitories. He said he saw several people shot dead. “I will not forget this terrible scene for the rest of my life,” he said in a phone interview. “Students fell as if they were newly blossomed flowers.”

As shooting erupted, staff members at the university administration complex locked themselves in their offices, switched off the lights and lay on the floor, said Salma Khan, a university official. “We have some security staff, but they were not enough to face the Taliban,” she said.

Others praised the actions of Syed Hamid Hussain, the chemistry teacher who tried to hold off the rampaging gunmen with his pistol before he was killed. Teachers and lecturers in northwestern Pakistan have been allowed to carry weapons since the Peshawar school attack.

“They fired directly at the professor,” a sociology student named Muhammad Daud told Agence France-Presse, describing Hussain as “a real gentleman and a respectable teacher.”

After the attack, the army chief, General Raheel Sharif, visited the stricken campus and some of the wounded people at a nearby hospital. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, vowed to step up the fight against the Taliban.
“We are determined and resolved in our commitment to wipe out the menace of terrorism from our homeland,” Sharif said in a statement.

The Taliban’s logic for attacking a school, other than that it presented a relatively soft target, was not entirely clear. While attacks on army bases, five-star hotels and political leaders once appeared to cow Pakistanis, particularly in the early years after the insurgency erupted in 2007, the Peshawar massacre in 2014 outraged much of the country’s leadership and public.

Still, the military continues to turn a blind eye to certain militant groups, particularly those that target India. And while the wider Taliban movement appears weak and divided, some factions have in recent weeks renewed their violent campaign against targets in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.